Daily Search Forum Recap: April 14, 2010

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google Maps May Bring Back 3D Street Views
On April 1st, April Fools day, Google released 3D Street Views and it stayed up for about a week after the 1st. Then suddenly the feature dropped off the map and it was gone. Users started to complain and Google has heard their voices. Alvin from the Google Maps team updated a Google Maps Help said: Thanks for everyone's thoughts in this thread. I passed on all the feedback to the Street View engineering team.

Is Yell.com Selling Links?
Yesterday we ran a poll on how risky is link buying. Well, the last thing you want is me writing about your site when it sells links. :) Unfortunately, I found an interesting *public* thread at Google Webmaster Help about a big time web site, Yell.com allegedly selling links. The person who started the thread clearly wanted Google to take notice and he leaded to an example of a page with "sponsored listings" that are

Google Bangladesh Snubs Their Bengali New Year
Today is the Bengali New Year, or Pohela Boishakh (Bangladesh and India's West Bengal state). Now, I have no idea about the politics, if any, in Bangladesh but one person is very upset that Google.com.bd does not have a logo for the Bengali New Year. A Google Web Search Help thread has this guys message: Today is the New Year of Bangladesh and google did not change its logo !!! It is such a big

Will Twitter's Promoted Tweets Ad Model Work?
Twitter announced how they plan to make money in the upcoming years, through promoted tweets! Twitter will monetize their Twitter.com search results pages with these promoted tweets. This is a lot like AdWords on Google web search results. But to me, it seems like these ads will be placed directly in the search stream's timeline. In the future, they do plan to push these Promoted Tweets directly into user's timelines, not via the search results

Bing Tests Twitter In Web Search Results
Bing announced they are testing adding Twitter posts directly in their search results. Both Google and Yahoo already do this, and now Bing is going this route. Bing did offer tweet answers in the web results and they do offer bing.com/twitter but this is new. I personally do not see the test, so here are screen shots from the Bing blog: Yes, a section for "social results" for hot queries. For navigational queries, Bing will